Nogun
The No Gun Ri massacre was a mass killing of South Korean civilian refugees by United States military air and ground forces near the village of Nogeun-ri (노근리) in central South Korea from July 26 to 29, 1950, during the US Army's retreat in the early phase of the Korean War. In 2005, a South Korean government inquest certified the names of 163 dead or missing and 55 wounded, and added that many other victims' names were not reported. The No Gun Ri Peace Foundation estimates 250–300 were killed, mostly women and children.
The incident was little known outside Korea until publication of an Associated Press (AP) story in 1999 in which veterans of the U.S. Army unit involved, the 7th Cavalry Regiment, corroborated survivors' accounts. The AP also uncovered declassified U.S. Army orders to fire on approaching civilians because of reports of North Korean infiltration of refugee groups. In 2001, the U.S. government conducted an investigation and, after previously rejecting survivors' claims, acknowledged the killings, but described the three-day event as "an unfortunate tragedy inherent to war and not a deliberate killing". Then-President Bill Clinton issued a statement of regret, adding the next day that "things happened which were wrong", but survivors' demands for an apology and compensation were rejected.
South Korean investigators disagreed with the U.S. report, saying they believed that 7th Cavalry troops were ordered to fire on the refugees. The survivors' group called the U.S. report a "whitewash" of a war crime. The AP later discovered additional archival documents showing that U.S. commanders ordered troops to "shoot" and "fire on" civilians at the war front during this period; these declassified documents had been found but not disclosed by the Pentagon investigators. Among the undisclosed documents was a letter from the U.S. ambassador in South Korea stating that the U.S. military had adopted a theater-wide policy of firing on approaching refugee groups. Despite demands, the U.S. investigation was not reopened.
Prompted by the exposure of No Gun Ri, survivors of similar alleged U.S. war crimes from 1950 to 1951 filed reports with the South Korean government. In 2008, an investigative commission said more than 200 cases of alleged large-scale killings by the U.S. military had been registered, mostly air attacks.
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